"Sind wir vielleicht h i e r, um zu sagen: Haus, Brücke, Brunne, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, - höchstens: Säule, Turm . . . aber zu s a g e n, verstehs, oh zu sagen so, wie selber die Dinge niemals innig meinten zu sein."
"Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, - possibly: Pillar, Tower? . . . but for saying, remember, oh, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be."
Duino Elegies, R.M Rilke trans. J.B. Leishman
Things: A Spectrum of Photography 1850-2001 (Jonathan Cape, £35) is based on Seeing Things: Photographing Objects 1850-2001, an exhibition at London's Victoria & Albert Museum in 2002, assembled by the museum's senior curator, Mark Haworth-Booth, who retired last year. The V&A began purchasing photographs in 1852, and by now its collection is one of the finest in the world, as this selection of more than 100 images from the archive attests.
The pictures were taken not just by professional photographers, but also by painters, journalists, advertising executives, scientists, yet all are evidence of a loving and, indeed, reverential attention to the world and its objects. In her elegant introduction to the book, critic and novelist Marina Warner writes: "A photograph makes the world visible to us, turning whatever its subjects are, however natural, into artefacts, and in that fusion, redefining the marvellous and the wonderful."
Photography is a democratic medium, and in these pages the lofty and the humble are thrown jostlingly together in ways that shed a new luminance upon both: see, for instance, the startling echo between Edward Weston's exquisite study of a nautilus shell on page 42, and, 50 pages later, the same photographer's rear view of a porcelain lavatory bowl, which Weston, with his tongue barely in his cheek, likens to the Winged Victory of Samothrace. And why, one may ask, risking a prominent place in Pseud's Corner, should not a lavatory bowl be beautiful? Weston's photograph is Rilkean saying at its most wittily profound.
There is humour here more blatant. The famous 1963 photograph of Christine Keeler, heroine of the Profumo affair, sitting splay-legged on a bent-plywood chair is followed by a shot of Dame Edna Everage in the same pose - "I've always known how to sit modestly in a chair, which is more than you can say for my colleague Sharon Stone" - and this in turn is followed by a catalogue-style photograph of the chair itself, with an accompanying note by Gareth Williams, of the V&A Department of Furniture, Textiles and Dress, informing us drily that it "was designed in imitation of Arne Jacobsen's model 3107 chair, in continuous production by Fritz Hansen of Denmark since 1957". Ah, those Danes . . .
As so often in photography, the least elaborate is the most impressive. Perhaps the loveliest, certainly the most mysterious, image in the book is an untitled James Welling study from 1981 of a swathe of dark grey drapery which in the artist's words evokes "a feeling of mortality, of elegy, and also of sails, flags, bunting . . . of something missing, of things although distant still with us . . ." What better description could be found of photography itself, that passionately dispassionate recorder of things that although distant are still intensely with us?